Copyright (c) 1993 by Annalee Newitz,
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GENDER SLUMMING
Annalee Newitz
BAD SUBJECTS #7, SEPTEMBER 1993
1. Transgender
Transgendered people have officially joined the ranks of
publicly recognized "minorities" like homosexuals, women or any
number of racial and ethnic groups. The term "transgender"
describes an act or series of acts which, until recently, were not
understood to designate an identity as such. It is still an identity
which requires an explanation, and articles about transgenderism
usually begin with a brief definition that goes something like this
one: "'Transgender' people...include straight and gay drag queens,
transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites and others whose gender
identity does not correspond to their biology or expected social roles"
(_The San Francisco Chronicle_, 5/28/93). But such a definition does
little more than describe a new alliance between previously
disparate individuals. What gets left out of this definition are the
social and political consequences of forming a transgender identity
and the historical situation which made it possible.
At a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, a
militant transsexual group called Transgender Nation protested
because transsexualism is still designated a mental illness by the
APA. Part of the purpose of defining transgenderism as an identity
is clearly to prove that it is not an illness or an aberration, but rather
a cultural "choice" within the context of an American multiculture.
However, like many marginalized groups, some transgenderists
contend that in fact their predilections are *not* a choice, any more
than being female or black is a choice. Transsexuals, those who
undergo sex change operations, are particularly invested in making
the claim that an essential part of them is female (or, rarely, male)
and must be brought out through surgical intervention. My point
here would simply be that transgenderists, like other minority
groups, are divided on the question of whether their culture is
"natural" (and even rooted in biology) or deeply bound up with social
and historical factors.
For the purposes of this article, I will be focusing largely on the
phenomenon of male-to-female transgendered people. By far the
most transgendered people are male-to-female, and this fact alone
merits analysis. Moreover, as Marjorie Garber points out in her
scholarly work on cross-dressing _Vested Interests_ (1991), female-
to-male transgendered people are not generally understood to be as
remarkable as male-to-female transgendered people, because in
male-dominated culture as we know it, it is "normal" when women
want to become men. For participants in male-dominated culture it
is obvious that social power is most often attached to male bodies. If
a woman wants social power, it is clear she might attempt to gain it
by impersonating a man. Why a man might choose to go the other
way is more complicated. Finally, I would like quickly to point out
that I will not be contesting the usefulness, accuracy or even fairness
of the identity designation "transgender", which subsumes several
previously separate sexual minority cultures and acts. In what
follows I will be analyzing transgenderists as a unified group not
because I believe the grouping is "right" but simply because the
grouping already exists as a cultural category.
In a recent work on American media culture and
psychoanalysis called _Enjoy Your Symptom!_ (1992), Slavoj Zizek
asks in the title of one chapter, "Why is woman a symptom of man?"
What he alludes to in this intentionally humorous question is a
proposition within contemporary psychoanalytic theory (and
feminism) that character traits and social roles associated with
women come from what are basically male fantasies. Women, in
other words, did not themselves invent the idea of "femininity";
rather it was invented for them by men. While the definition of
"femininity" changes depending upon historical period and
geographical location, generally the term refers to those talents and
shortcomings which make women "best suited" to perform domestic
labor -- and perhaps renders them incapable of doing anything else.
Clearly, the idea of femininity is ultimately more beneficial to males
than females: it guarantees men freedom from domestic work and
grants them the privileges of public authority.
I find Zizek's question useful because it implies that gender
division is itself a form of "illness" which generates symptoms.
Furthermore, the question reminds us that the fantasy which is
"femininity" tells us more about men than it does about actually
existing women. What I want to contend is that transgender is a
symptom, just as woman is a symptom, of the social disruption
caused by gender division. While "woman" is an ancient and
enduring symptom of gender division, transgender is perhaps the
most historically recent one; it is, as I will argue below, what might
be called a post-feminist symptom generated by the slow withering
away of what we know of today as "woman".
One of the most obvious consequences of turning transgender
into an official identity is that it creates an imaginary boundary
between the gendered person and the transgendered person. That is,
once we have a particular group willing to represent itself and be
represented as transgender, the rest of the population is able to feel
that much more secure about dividing itself up along gender lines.
Both academic and popular studies of gender identity tend to
represent transgender as an innovation which challenges the
traditional gender roles associated with sexism, homophobia and
domestic violence. One form this endorsement of transgender-as-
identity often takes is an insistence upon how "beautiful" or
aesthetically pleasing transgendered people are. Recently, American
audiences were most surprised by the film _The Crying Game_
(1993) this past year partially because Dil, the transvestite character,
was "so beautiful" as a woman. (It is interesting to note, as an aside,
that once Dil's penis is revealed, the male character who is about to
have sex with her literally vomits.)
In an article on transgender published by _The East Bay
Express_ (6/4/93), Steve Heimoff is careful to describe the
transsexuals he interviews in terms of how attractive they are. Of
Gianna Israel, a counselor for transgendered people and a male-to-
female transgendered person herself, he writes, "[She has] a fetching
smile...she has skillfully mastered the accoutrements of femininity,
from the dainty way she walks, to the way she crosses her legs."
Meeting another transsexual for an interview, his first comment
concerns the way she is dressed: "A towering person, teeter-
tottering on four-inch spike heels, wrapped in a black, skintight
minidress, split to the thigh, and revealing enough flesh to stop an
army." What both _The Crying Game_ and these descriptions convey
to their audiences about transgendered people is that they look and
act *just like women*.
That is, they more or less successfully embody the cultural
stereotypes a male-dominated culture calls "feminine". Moreover, if
they are open about being transgendered people, they may find
themselves to be the unwilling victims of fear, outrage and prejudice.
As a result, transgendered people face virulent discrimination in the
workplace and danger on the streets -- just like women. It is
precisely this relationship transgender identity shares with woman
identity which tells us that transgender is part of an ongoing gender
problem rather than any kind of real solution.
American culture experienced the heyday of the women's
movement just two decades ago, at which time many real women
fought to be appreciated for their professional skills and intellectual
capabilities rather than their beauty and vulnerability. To a certain
extent, the women's movement is changing the roles available to
women in American culture generally. Women have gained more
social power in the past few decades than ever before in history, but
they still have relatively little power when compared to their male
counterparts. Nevertheless, men are aware of the threat women
pose to their jobs and social prestige. It seems to me no surprise,
then, that a post-feminist culture has found out a way to reinvent
the woman as she once was: socially disempowered, largely
unemployed and eager to appear physically attractive. And this
woman is just as much man-made as ever--in fact, she is a man who
has simply altered his physical appearance in order to be "female".
Transgender could therefore be understood as a form of
nostalgia for traditional gender. It is hopefully clear to almost
anyone why men would experience more nostalgia for traditional
gender than women might. Historically, gender division has allowed
men to project onto women those personality traits in themselves
associated with weakness, confusion, hysteria, dependence and fear.
That is, gender division implies both a material and an emotional
division of labor in any given population: women perform menial
domestic tasks *and* they act out those emotional or
characterological states which are deemed most publicly
unacceptable. As long as both genders accept their emotional tasks,
it is easy for men to believe that they are somehow biologically
predisposed to strength, rationality, intellectual autonomy and any
number of other valuable leadership qualities. But in most
contemporary first world countries women actively oppose the
"naturalness" of this division of labor, and in fact demonstrate its
inaccuracy by challenging it in the first place. Subsequently men are
forced to become aware that women can fight oppression just like
"men" would -- and if women can behave like men, there might exist
somewhere inside themselves a powerless and frightened "woman"
just waiting to come out.
Carol Clover, in her recent and widely read _Men, Women and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film_ (1992), points out
that horror films featuring female protagonist-victims are most
popular among men. Clover writes that men identify with female
victims in these films as a way of experiencing, vicariously, their own
feelings of fear and victimization. But this identification is what
might be called a transgendered identification -- that is, the man
must first imaginatively project himself into the body of a woman in
order to "feel" helpless in the first place. While Clover is interested
in men who "become" women only in the realm of fiction, the same
principle can be applied to men who become women in everyday life,
whether temporarily or on a permanent basis. Male-to-female
transgendered people are no longer able, for whatever reason, to
project their feelings of weakness and victimization onto real or
fictional women. But they continue to believe that certain feelings
are masculine and others are feminine. Rather than acknowledging
that it is possible for a man to feel or act in ways associated with
traditional femininity, the male-to-female transgender concludes
that he must "really" be female. What the male-to-female
transgender rejects is not simply his own masculinity, but also any
possibility for an equal division of labor between the genders. He
becomes a woman precisely in order to deny the possibility that real
men might share with real women the same kinds of emotional and
material burdens.
I'd like to emphasize here that "feeling like a woman" or even
"being a woman" cannot, in a male-dominated culture, ever be a good
feeling. It is always, at some level, to feel inadequate, helpless and
inferior; in short, it is to feel "impotent". Male-to-female
transgendered people often report feeling "better" and "more
natural" after their operations or during the times when they are
cross-dressed. I do not wish to argue with their subjective
experiences -- my point is simply that as "women", and especially as
transgendered people, they occupy a marginal and frequently
degraded position in mainstream culture. I would even venture to
argue that the act of masquerading as a woman, whether by dressing
up or by receiving surgery, suggests an act of self-destruction or
self-punishment. But if men understand their transgendered
identities as forms of self-affirmation, why might I want to make
the claim that they are essentially deluding themselves?
The answer can be found if we consider the kinds of relations
real women have with real men. I have already stated that gender
division is nothing more than a division of social and economic labor.
Transgendered men become women because they have chosen to
perform some aspect of women's labor. They may believe this choice
was made for them by a "core" orientation, but nevertheless they
have consciously *decided* to switch genders. No one forces them to
do it. However, real women *have* been forced to become "women"
simply by being born into a gender divided culture. In other words,
the only model of "woman" these transgendered men have is based
on an identity which is not chosen, but *enforced*.
To the extent that transgendered men are mimicking an
enforced gender identity, they are also acting out its enforcement
when they become women. Therefore, they are also basing their
ideas about what it means to switch genders on examples of *forced*
gender conversion. What does forced gender conversion look like? I
will offer you an example from real life. Late in June of 1993, a
woman in Virginia who claimed her husband had been abusing and
raping her cut off his penis while he was sleeping. She carried the
penis with her to their car, got in and drove off. Then she threw his
penis out the window at an intersection. Police officers, finding the
penis, put it on ice and immediately took it to the hospital where the
castrated man was being treated. Doctors sewed it back on. The
story made national headlines and was joked about on _The Arsenio
Hall Show_.
This woman wanted to hurt her husband. But the only way she
could imagine hurting her husband involved making him into a
woman. While her aim was no doubt to physically wound her
husband, probably fatally, the wound she chose to make was
meaningful to almost anyone living in a male-dominated culture. By
castrating her husband, she was trying to divest him of his (abusive)
power over her -- a power she associated with his masculinity and
male sexual organs. This woman believed strongly in a gendered
division of labor. She behaved as if no "man" could ever feel fear or
hurt the way she did. Her act was one of enforced transgendering.
Moreover, it demonstrated the way becoming a woman and being
hurt are intimately connected in a gender divided world.
When a man goes transgender and becomes a woman, what he
internalizes as "being a woman" is a version of this kind of violence
and violation. For the male-to-female transgender castrates
*himself*, either by paying a surgeon to remove his male genitalia, or
by "passing" as female on a number of separate occasions. That is,
the woman the male-to-female transgenderist becomes is a woman
who hurts him. What is it then, that drives him to desire
victimization in a woman's body? Why, as the beneficiary of
authority in male-dominated culture, does the transgendered man
forfeit his own male entitlement? Something outside gender
relations is forcing him down.
2. Downward Mobility
A man is not made powerful by his gender alone. He works at
being powerful in an historically specific economic system as well as
a generalized gender system. In a capitalist economy, power means
making a profit. Labor in capitalism *is* divided up along gender
lines, but mostly it is divided up along class lines. The middle and
upper classes have powerful and profitable jobs while the underclass
and the unemployed have menial or "unimportant" jobs (if they have
any at all). Therefore, a man may be powerful as a man, but
powerless as a worker. To the extent that he associates power with
both masculinity and capital, he cannot truly be a "man" without
money. And thus he may be unwillingly "transgendered" by forces
other than feelings: he is also unmanned by the market and the
conditions under which he must labor in a class divided economy.
Let me provide you with another example of transgender
culture as it gets represented in the recent documentary _Paris is
Burning_ (1990). This is the documentary which helped mainstream
a dance form called "vogueing", subsequently used by Madonna in
her hit song "Vogue". Vogueing is a dance style which comes out of
the black transvestite bars and balls in Harlem during the 70s and
80s. A transvestite interviewed in the film tells the documentary
audience that "drag" originally described men who dressed up as
women and went to balls where they were judged for "realness",
beauty, originality or resemblance to a popular female star. But after
the 70s (and the women's movement, which he doesn't mention),
drag balls diversified--people who attended dressed up as many
different kinds of woman as well as different kinds of straight men.
Men who dress up as straight men often choose to wear military
uniforms, expensive business suits or police gear of some sort.
One of the most "real-looking" male-to-female transvestites in
_Paris is Burning_ says that part of "her" fantasy when cross-dressed
is of being "a rich somebody". This theme of escaping the ghetto to
become wealthy and famous comes up again and again in the
interviews with transgendered people in _Paris is Burning_. It goes
without saying that men are more often capable of attaining wealth
and fame (or power generally) in gendered culture as we know it.
When a man is at a disadvantage due to his class background, often
he cannot attain the status a gendered culture has promised him. A
man can imaginatively compensate for this loss in two different
ways. He might fantasize about being a more powerful man. Or he
might fantasize that, as a "woman", he naturally *desires*
disempowerment.
But the satisfaction a man derives from having and acting on
fantasies about being a woman goes beyond simply convincing
himself that he wants to be a victim or a biological female. Becoming
a woman in a male-dominated culture doesn't *only* involve being
hurt or having no penis. It also involves participating in the market
economy as a certain kind of consumer. A strong relationship exists
between the amount of money a man is willing to pay and the degree
to which his gender masquerade or conversion is successful.
Transsexual alteration takes place over a period of years and
involves hormone injections, psychotherapy and extensive plastic
surgery. Less costly is the transvestite or cross-dresser's
masquerade, which nevertheless involves purchasing women's
clothing, undergarments, shoes, makeup and accessories. Women's
garments and accessories are notoriously more expensive than men's,
and owning wardrobes for two different genders is bound to be
pricey.
Because we live in a culture which is largely dominated not just
by men, but by the wealthy elite, I think therefore it is safe to
speculate that becoming an "authentic" or "real-looking" woman is,
for a man, partly a way of displaying his economic power. That is, he
spends money to dress up like a woman who owns fashion luxuries.
And, when he dresses up or gets surgery, he also proves that he can
afford to create or accessorize two people -- himself and his female
self. Therefore, the wish to be what passes for powerful in a divided
society must also be integral to every male-to-female transgendered
person's "identity". Ultimately, he uses his fantasy to conspicuously
consume like a member of the middle or upper class might. Of
course, since he may not actually be a member of the middle class,
he more accurately engages in substituting *images* associated with
power for *real* social power.
Cross-gendering and cross-dressing could therefore be
understood as "compensatory fantasy". A compensatory fantasy
generates forms of satisfaction reality does not provide.
Transgendered men are compensating for their sense of social
impotence by having a powerful fantasy life -- a fantasy life which
they collectively act out when they dress up together. The male-to-
female transgendered people in _Paris is Burning_ have lost and
continue to lose the social status accorded to (straight) men in
gendered culture, partly because of their race and sexual orientation,
but mostly because they are poor. The "loss" that inaugurates the
transgendered person's compensatory fantasy is twofold: he has lost
or loses a socio-economic power he associates with his masculine
prerogative, *and* his act takes place in a culture which stereotypes
women as a social class that normally loses. He acts out his sense of
social failure by "being a woman", but he also compensates for that
sense of failure by consuming commodities as if he were powerful,
"like a man". Clearly, transgendered people do not just desire a
different gender. They also desire a different kind of social power --
and specifically, economic power.
In fact, the male-to-female transgender shares this desire with
another boundary-transgressive identity existing solely within the
economic realm. I refer, of course, to the middle class "slummer".
Garber's work on cross-dressing becomes relevant at this point once
again. Under the category of "cross-dresser" she includes, I believe
quite rightly, those men and women who dress or perform as other
races and nationalities -- people who might be called transnationals
and transracials. When members of the middle class in America go
transnational or transracial it is generally known as slumming.
Slumming can mean going into ethnic ghettos to experience
"authentic" -- and usually cheap -- food, music and crafts produced
by disadvantaged minority groups. Throughout most of the 20th
Century, middle class people have slummed particularly in African-
American ghettos where jazz, rock and rap music were enjoyed
before they hit the mainstream. Slumming for Americans can also
mean living temporarily or permanently in a 2nd or 3rd World
country where one's money, educational background and nationality
are far more valuable (and powerful) than they would be in the 1st
World. Right now post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially
Prague, are the favored places for Americans to go slumming.
When a middle class American slums, she experiences a
heightened sense of her own power and importance on the basis of
her national, ethnic and class identity. But slumming is not about
feeling powerful. It is more precisely a controlled dosage of
impotence -- a temporary identification with the disempowered,
oppressed or underprivileged which allows the slummer to enjoy
slum culture without having to confront the material consequences of
life in the real slums. It should go without saying that the slum
means something very different to someone who was born and grew
up there. Slumming implies *choosing* to live in poverty, and one
can only make this choice if there already exist groups of people and
places where poverty is not a choice, where poverty is *imposed*.
Earlier I discussed how an identity like transgender gets
produced when particular actions and choices are represented in
dominant culture as expressions of a person's "soul". Likewise, the
identity of the slummer suggests that living in poverty is a choice
people can make because they are naturally inclined to a life of
marginalization, disempowerment and material scarcity. To a certain
extent, slummers fantasize that real members of the underclass have
*chosen* their identities too. Their easy downward mobility becomes
"proof" for the ease with which one might become upwardly mobile.
Slumming is therefore the perfect compensatory fantasy for the
middle class in regards to class division. It perpetuates the myth
that class is merely a state of mind. When a middle class person
dresses up in underclass drag, she convinces herself that the line
between economic classes is fake, just a kind of masquerade. Of
course, it is masquerade for the slummer, but rarely is it so for real
underclass people.
Acts of slumming justify the division between the middle class
and the underclass, just as acts of transgendering reinforce gender
inequality. The middle class maintains its privileged position by
inventing an underclass to do its dirty work -- to perform manual
labor, salaried domestic labor and menial service jobs. Man, as I
have already contended, invented woman for much the same reason.
What gender division shares with class division at this point in
history is a structure of domination which is maintained through the
deliberate effacement of the difference between fantasy and reality.
Transgendered people and slummers are two identities generated,
like symptoms, by unresolved class conflict. Both are identities
predicated upon the use of fantasy to cross and even protest social
divisions without actually dismantling the divisions themselves.
3. Social Fantasy
What we have here are two fantasies of mobility within
hierarchy entertained by individual members of privileged social
groups: men and the middle class. We have also seen that male-to-
female transgendered people and middle class slummers fantasize at
the expense of disadvantaged people as well as at their own. But it's
important to remember that the fantasies we have examined here
are as much about escaping gender and class division as they are
complicit in maintaining them. In an ideal world, of course, people
*could* choose to perform whatever kind of emotional or material
labor they wished. But this is hardly an ideal world, although male-
to-female transgendered people and slummers act like it is. So we
must ask *where* their acts of fantasy came from in the first place.
I have already made clear that they need fantasies because
reality lets them down. But *needing* a fantasy is not the same as
having a *particular kind* of fantasy about specific social categories.
What was the "first" fantasy that gave way to all these others? It is
a fantasy about history. People are educated in fantasizing by a
culture already based upon a total social fantasy about social
divisions existing unchanged throughout history. Both transgender
and slumming are dependent upon the idea that gender and class are
transhistorical conditions, things that go on "forever". To invent an
identity which represents a crossing-over of social boundaries, a
culture must have faith in the reality and permanence of those social
boundaries. That is, these identities would be inconceivable in a
world without a strong sense of what constitutes gender and class
separation. For transgendering and slumming are just two more
ways of articulating the "impossibility" of ever *synthesizing* social
categories rather than merely jumping from one to the other.
However, the transgendered person and the slummer reveal to
us that "forever" is sheer fantasy. Transgendered people and
slummers are historically *specific* forms of identity -- that is, they
could only have come into being contemporary with late capitalism
and post-feminism. One could not have transgender-as-identity
without feminism (or gay rights), which came along only a few years
ago. And one could not go slumming without living in multinational
capitalism, which was invented in this century. Gender division and
class division as we know them have not gone on "forever", nor do
they have to continue into the future. The idea that social division is
"natural" because it has "always" been there is a fantasy people have
at their own expense. It is a fantasy that benefits some powerful
people -- for they can claim that their power has "always" existed --
and leaves the rest of society trapped, immobile and divided.
The fantasy of "forever" is what leads people to dress up rather
than fight for the social power they deserve. When they dress up in
other people's bodies and clothes, transgendered people and
slummers play at living in a world where social mobility is possible
for everyone. Believing in the fantasy that all history is "the same",
they are happy to let most people remain oppressed as they have
"always" been. Furthermore, to the extent that their fantasies
involve transgressing social boundaries they were born with, they
are also cheating themselves when they choose to respect those
boundaries rather than knocking them down. Moving around
playfully within a social system is very different from dismantling
the system itself. Because the transgendered person and the
slummer gain pleasure only as a result of social and economic
divisions in material reality, they perpetuate a social system which
forces many people to lose -- both privately and publicly -- freely
chosen social mobility.
_______________
Annalee Newitz is a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, writing her
dissertation on monsters in contemporary American popular culture.
She is also senior editor for Bad Subjects.